Automne (Autumn)

‘In nature I hear the voice of the universe, the voice of humanity, and the voices of East and West. In it I find a wellspring of inspiration that gives poetic meaning and feeling to my work. The act of creation is pure spontaneity; it is acting naturally without deliberate thought. As in traditional Taoist teaching, creation is “the pouring out of the romantic feeling in your heart”.’ – Chu Teh-Chun

 In early 1985, Chu Teh-Chun arrived in Geneva by train, where he encountered an unexpected and breathtaking winter spectacle. He had come to attend ‘5 Abstraits en 1985’ (5 Abstract Artists in 1985), a group exhibition held at Galerie Pierre Huber. At the time, an extraordinary snowstorm swept across Europe – later hailed by the media as ‘the snowstorm of the century’ – covering the city in a mantle of white snow. The sheer force of the blizzard stood in stark contrast to the stillness that followed the snowfall. Drifting snowflakes, crystalline air, and diffused light coalesced into a deeply arresting visual experience.

Inspired by this natural scenery, Chu Teh-Chun began to consider how, within the language of abstract painting, the expressive quality of calligraphy might embody genuine emotion and recreate the visual sensations evoked by the grandeur and stillness he had witnessed, giving rise to a poetic visual narrative. Drawing upon the spirit of the freehand style in Chinese ink painting, he sought to convey an authentic experience while merging it with the visual language of French lyrical abstraction, exploring how a heartfelt encounter with nature could be turned into an expression of calligraphic abstraction and poetic sensibility.

Upon returning to his studio in Bagnolet, Chu Teh-Chun continued to deepen his reflections on the experience, gradually developing a new visual language that brought together strength and serenity, movement and transparency. It was in this context that Autumn came into being. Over the ensuing decade, the artist transformed the snow scene into inner visions, poetry, and landscapes, as he discarded the descriptive brushwork of figurative scenery and turned to expressive symbols – dots, lines, and planes – distilled from nature. Through the interplay of these elements, he constructed space; through the momentum of the brush, he articulated form; through the spirit resonance of the image, he conveyed the essence of the observed landscape.

In Chinese painting, Dong Qichang was a pivotal figure in elevating the ‘brush and ink’ into an independent aesthetic subject. In his Notes from the Painting-Meditation Studio, he wrote: ‘If one judges by the marvels of nature’s forms, painting cannot compare with landscape; if one judges by the refinement of brush and ink, landscape can never compare with painting.’ In other words, while natural landscapes possess extraordinary wonders wrought by nature itself, when it comes to the refinement and cultivation of brush and ink, real landscapes cannot rival painting. From this aesthetic perspective, brush and ink are no longer merely tools for depicting nature; rather, they become the aesthetic subject through which the truth, goodness, and beauty of painting are expressed.

This snowstorm of the century marked a turning point in Chu Teh-Chun’s artistic development. His snow scenes captured boundless, poetic expanses of snow white, shifting light, and the atmospheric transformations in which heaven and earth converge. These visions prompted him to rethink how the Chinese ideal of the ‘unity of poetry, calligraphy, and painting’, together with the spiritual cultivation of brush embodied in brush and ink, might be integrated into oil painting and turned into an idiom of the medium. Following Dong Qichang’s elevation of brush and ink into an independent aesthetic subject, Chinese painting had, in effect, made the shift towards ‘the medium as content’ three centuries before 20th^-century Western abstract painting. The snow scenes resonated with Chu’s longstanding artistic enquiry and his probe into the possibility of integrating abstract painting with brush and ink as an aesthetic subject, and his creative fervour continued to intensify as a result. The Snow Scenes series became one of the artist’s most important bodies of work. Between 1985 and 1990, he created only 13 snow scenes of comparable or larger dimensions, including the three aforementioned works conceived around the colours of the four seasons. Poetic in spirit, they evoke nature’s abundance from the golden autumn through to the auspicious snowfall of Christmas Day, infusing their abstract forms with the splendour of the seasons and the experience of nature. The large-scale snow scenes inspired by this experience include the present work, Autumn, as well as the monumental works Spring and Summer. Most of the important works from the Snow Scenes series are now held in prominent institutional collections, while the present work is being offered at auction for the first time since its creation.

‘I love Chinese poetry. It has become part of my paintings. It is no coincidence that Western critics think of my painting as poetic abstraction.’ – Chu Teh-Chun

 At the metaphysical level, Chinese painting has, since Xie He, placed ‘spiritual resemblance’ above ‘formal resemblance’ as a visual aesthetic pursuit. This represents the most fundamental distinction between Chinese painting and the Western classical tradition of realism. With spirit resonance and vitality as its highest ideal, brush and ink serve not merely as means of creating form, but also as the material embodiment of the painter’s spirit, cultivation, and character.

The development of Chu Teh-Chun’s artistic language was rooted in the rich traditions of Chinese culture. His early training in calligraphy gave him an intimate understanding of the rhythm and force of the movement of brush and ink, as well as a deep insight into the creation of atmosphere and the spirit of the literati. This sensitivity to line, spirit resonance, and rhythm would later become a vital foundation for the poetic spirit of his abstract painting. The continued development of the language of Chinese brush and ink, together with its synthesis with Western aesthetics, was the aspiration of artists at China Academy of Art and a longstanding vision of Lin Fengmian.

Upon his arrival in Paris, Chu Teh-Chun distinguished himself within the city’s abstract art circles, as his work resonated closely with the spirituality and emotional expression pursued by artists of French Lyrical Abstraction. As one of the major movements in post-war European abstract art, Lyrical Abstraction emphasised the artist’s subjective sensations and inner experience, exploring the expression of spirit resonance and the inner world through free and spontaneous forms, colours, and brushwork. As the word ‘lyrical’ suggests, works of Lyrical Abstraction often unfold within a narrative space that transcends linear time, turning the artist’s perception of nature, life, and the real world into an abstract language. For Chu, whose artistic sensibility was nourished by Chinese poetry, calligraphy and painting, this offered a pathway for synthesising the spirit of Eastern freehand style and Western abstract art. He incorporated into his oil work the spatial conception of Chinese landscape painting, the rhythm of calligraphic brushwork, and the spirituality of literati painting, transforming Chinese aesthetics into a modern abstract language.

In traditional Chinese aesthetics, an image can embody layers of perception and emotion. The Chinese character ‘snow’, composed of only a few strokes, encompasses a remarkable variety of natural forms, from ice crystals and rime to falling snow. Likewise, in Chinese poetry, a single character or a single scene can be endowed with myriad thoughts and emotions. In Chu Teh-Chun’s snow scenes, snow appears at times as flakes drifting through the sky, at others as ice crystallising, taking on an array of forms within the confines of the canvas. The paintings distil the various transformations of snow, allowing its movement to course through the compositions and giving rise to an expressive power akin to that of poetry.

In the exploration between observed reality and abstract form, Chu Teh-Chun and Gerhard Richter pursued distinctly different paths. Richter dissolved the certainty of the image through blurring and erasure, deliberately preserving the fluidity of memory and perception; Chu, by contrast, created and constructed form within this fluidity, bringing his abstraction closer to the spirit of Eastern freehand style and the pursuit of poetry. Both sought to transcend the direct representation of reality, yet responded to lived experience in different ways: the former pared away detail, leaving behind the lingering resonance of feeling; the latter reconstructed the essential elements of nature, elevating fleeting perception into a poetic visual language. Through splashes of colour, washes and calligraphic brushwork, Chu transformed spirit resonance and vitality, an ideal pursued in landscape painting, into a modern visual language.

‘In my works, the colours and lines are never merely accidental. They arrive at the same purpose harmoniously; they stimulate light and evoke formal and melodic rhythms.’ – Chu Teh-Chun

Within his extraordinary oeuvre, the Snow Scenes series is undoubtedly among his most poetic and iconic chapters. The seemingly free and uninhibited brushwork is underpinned by a remarkable degree of control. The intersecting, dot-like brushstrokes are the artist’s response to the swirling of snowflakes, the refraction of light, and the movement of the atmosphere. At first glance, this brushwork recalls the drip paintings of the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. However, the two artists’ practices were rooted in fundamentally different artistic philosophies. Pollock’s practice emerged from the post-war Western exploration of the subconscious, chance, and ‘automatism’. By contrast, in his pursuit of the energy and rhythm of nature, Chu Teh-Chun embraced the unity of painter and brush, while emphasising the energy released through both bodily movement and the creative process. It shows an exceptional mastery of brush and ink and complete command of spatial composition. What appears spontaneous and fluid is imbued with an intricate spatial order.

Although the concept of ‘abstraction’ does not exist in traditional Chinese painting, the aesthetic tradition of the ‘freehand’ style can be traced back to the literal paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties, reaching a breakthrough in the reduced-stroke figure paintings of Liang Kai in the Southern Song dynasty. Rather than seeking to faithfully depict the external world, freehand painting employs concise yet richly calligraphic brushwork to convey the spirit and vitality of things. Its concern is not with ‘what is seen’, but with ‘what is felt’ and ‘what is understood’. The present work, Autumn, represents a significant achievement in this exploration. In the painting, Chu Teh-Chun uses splashes and dots, dry-brush strokes, and transparent layers of colour. The dense stippling evokes snowflakes dancing in the wind, while the linear brushwork sweeps across the composition like currents of air and light. Every stroke and sweep of the brush conjures up the different states of water at varying temperatures – gathering or dispersing, flowing or crystallising – revealing the artist’s observation and distillation of the processes through which nature takes form. The language of brush and ink, formed through layers of dry-brush strokes and splashed marks, creates variations of light and shadow and spatial depth, as though light were refracted and diffused as it passed through wind and snow. Amidst the warm hues of autumn, cool tones of lake blue and blue-green emerge and recede, set against layers of white. The interplay of warm and cool tones creates an ethereal and poetic autumn landscape after the snowfall. This artistic practice both carries forward the Chinese tradition of freehand style and resonates with Lyrical Abstraction’s pursuit of emotional and spiritual expression, allowing the painting, like poetry, to open onto an infinite realm within a finite form.

‘Along my journey to Geneva, I saw the Alps covered in snow. When the mists were moving, there were distinct layers and shifting tones between the white of the mists and the white of the snow. In my mind I could see nothing but scenes of those mists moving over the white lands and the depths appearing within them. My heart seemed to rise up and subside in time with the shifting colours, from deep to shallow, from dense to light, and immediately images from Tang poetry came to mind. As soon as I returned home I could hardly wait to start painting.’ – Chu Teh-Chun

Notably, Autumn is one of the Snow Scenes Chu Teh-Chun created in 1985, inspired by the four seasons. Named for and conceived around autumn, Autumn stands as one of the rarest and most meaningful works in his Snow Scenes series. Whereas conventional snowy landscapes focus on the depiction on nature, this series uses colour to imbue the paintings with a sense of temporality – the passage of time through the changing seasons. In traditional Chinese painting, snowy landscapes are predominately rendered in white and ink tones. Chu departed from this convention, depicting the scene in golden orange, red ochre, and warm yellow tones. Snow is no longer merely a symbol of the season, but becomes a medium through which light and atmosphere interact. The image calls to mind the autumnal landscapes of the Alps, where, above valleys ablaze with golden hues, snow that never melts blankets the mountains, creating a magnificent vision in which the changing seasons coexist with the enduring presence of nature. Chu was particularly attuned to the passage of the seasons, with a special fondness for autumn. Over the course of his long career, he created numerous works centred on autumnal scenes, often characterised by deep and saturated tones, with vivid reds, dark browns, and deep blacks interwoven throughout. Created in 1985, the present work stands out as a singular exception. It is as though Chu brought his sensations and memories of autumn into the snowy landscape, where the resonance of autumn lingers in the winter snow.

This approach can be traced back to the profound traditions of Chinese painting. The importance of spirit resonance, brush and ink, and the orchestration of space was recognised as early as Xie He’s Six Principles of Painting, articulated in The Record of the Classification of Old Painters. Chu Teh-Chun inherited the tradition of ‘integrating calligraphy into painting’, treating brush and ink as an expression of the artist’s inner state. He transformed the spirit resonance, brushwork, and spatial conception prized in the arts of calligraphy and painting into a modern abstract language. In this light, the Snow Scenes series represents the fullest expression of Chu’s exploration of colour, light, space and vitality, as well as an important achievement in the synthesis of Chinese aesthetics and Western abstract art.